Late Beta Feedback Part 1

1) The new Sinister Calling mechanic is much better than the old one because it eliminates the wonky snapshot and stack behavior or hemo however there are a few problems with the mechanic. The mechanic may break down at high gear levels, at around 60% MS, something that seems readily achievable with weapon enchants by the middle to end of the second tier the effective duration of rupture will be ~12-13 seconds. Given sub’s high cp gen the rotation should be reasonably sustainable but I’m not sure the managing a very short duration dot will be particularly enjoyable. The mechanic also makes it impossible at almost all gear levels to avoid refreshing rupture during FW, a generally important optimization for sub. At 12-13 seconds I believe rupture would be shortest duration active maintenance dot in the game.

Complicating the duration issues is SV, such a large portion of subtlety’s damage is tied up in maintaining an active bleed on the target that making those bleeds advance faster makes the rotation feel unforgiving and MS procs punitive despite being a net damage increase. It isn’t clear to me why SV as a mechanic needs to exist, rupture maintenance is already an important part of sub dps, elevating it with SV seems redundant.

With the change to SC its not clear why hemo snapshotting and dot rolling was removed since the mechanic wasn’t particularly problematic on its own. It seemed like a good solution to narrow the gap between positional uptime and lack of positional uptime. The mechanic was hugely problematic in the context of the old SC extra tick mechanic but with that mechanic changed it didn’t cause any problems.

Finally I mentioned in the AoE issues in an earlier post on sub AoE but the problem remains, even with the new version of SC. The MS interaction is sub’s big new mechanic and presumably the reason MS is sub’s fancy attuned stat however its value is diminished on AoE or in solo play. While stat weight variance between different situations is expected the lack of MS interaction on solo play and AoE seems problematic. This may also pose problems for subtlety on fights that do not allow high positional uptime, something that may be a problem even with the new, larger, backstab arc (this could be its own item but I’ve mostly given up on it).

2) I’m a huge fan of the new Bandit’s Guile mechanic, I think it has the potential to add a lot of dynamism to the combat rotation but the direction indicated by these two tweets (https://twitter.com/Celestalon/status/502167046247809024 and https://twitter.com/Celestalon/status/502222409139630080) seems worrying. If SS is strictly superior to RvS in every way, as suggested by the last tweet, then delaying BG doesn’t make a lot of sense. Not only are you reducing the uptime of the now 50% deep insight buff but you are also losing out damage and combo points versus normally advancing the rotation. This seems to remove the possibility of optimizations related to synchronizing cooldowns with BG. Shadowboy’s computations (http://venomousthoughts.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/bandits-guile-mechanic-in-warlords-of-draenor/) suggest on sustained single target a 5 second BG delay per cycle in moderate insight works out as dps neutral at best. This seems to relegate the new BG delaying mechanic to skipping enforced downtime, which seems like a waste of a potentially cool mechanic.

Even in the case of enforced downtime its not clear if BG delaying makes sense given the short duration of BG. I mentioned this in one of the first posts of the earlier thread, BG’s 15 second duration doesn’t make a ton of sense given BG’s rotational role as a pseudo-resource much like a monks TeB. Since RvS does not refresh BG using RvS to delay deep insight across even a short period of enforced downtime risks BG dropping completely. At the very least RvS should refresh the duration of the BG buff to make delaying less risky however even better would be increasing the baseline duration of non-deep insight BG. Combat already suffers more than other rogue specs on enforced downtime fights like Lei Shen due to BG falling off and the increased strength of deep insight (50% up from 30%) makes enforced downtime even more problematic. Given the substantial resource investment required to get into deep insight (600 energy, ~30-45 seconds) it seems odd that the buff should fall off so easily.

3) The combo point UI remains inadequate. We’ve talked a lot about the lack of change to combo point UI in this thread but it hasn’t been changed yet so lets talk about it again. The current combo point UI does a terrible job communicating the actual behavior of combo points, its no wonder many rogues believe combo points aren’t really on the rogue and are just being automatically redirected, that is what the UI communicates. Yes we can fix it with addons (kinda, more on that in a moment) but we shouldn’t have to use addons for the fundamental resource system of our class.

The funny part is addons can’t actually solve the issue because the GetComboPoints() function still returns 0 when we do not have an attackable target selected. Its still technically trackable by addons but it requires fully implementing the out of combat combo point decay logic which shouldn’t be necessary. We’ve heard the justification of “consistency” before but I don’t buy it, the functionality is no longer consistent so why should the UI have to be?

Finally on the topic of combo points there seem to be a lot of mechanics that just ignore anticipation. The assassination pvp 4pc bonus sets your combo points to 5 rather than generating 5 combo points. The sub FoK perk only generates extra combo points per target hit but not extra anticipation stacks. With combo points now on the rogue anticipation should work like the Monk talent Ascension and simply grant extra combo point bubbles on the UI. Combo points in the current system feel like a mess, caught half implemented and not totally functional. Three months ago this wasn’t a problem because beta is beta, things are expected to be half implemented and only partially functional but as we’re now in the polishing stage its very worrying.

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4 thoughts on “Late Beta Feedback Part 1”

Thks for all you work on the topic. Always interesting.
You said earlier that playing combat, you had a feeling that it was very slow to play. Is it still the case? By reading some stuffs I have the feeling that it should be preferable to level up with assassination, and make the first raid tiers with assassination. Then with a higher gear, and so with more haste take combat (so as usual I would say). Sorry for my english,I am french and I ma just trying to do my best :p
All the best for you next exploration!

Combat is still slow and haste will still fix it faster than normal. However there is a decent chance we won’t be haste stacking as combat, in current tuning combat wants to stack mastery and still feels really slow.

Spec balance is still somewhat up in the air so I don’t want to say too much about it yet.

Blizz actually did create a solution for the combo points but for whatever reason have yet to implement it in there own ui. The new command UnitPowerType 4 will allow tracking combo points without a target.